Looking through my stamp drawer I see a variety of penny and two-penny stamps that I use to “upgrade” my older valued stamps to whatever the current USPS rate might be. My memory isn’t all that great, and thus I have found the pursuit of mastering knowledge of current postage rates to be an elusive art.

As a remedy, I developed a US postage finder a few months back that wasn’t working anymore as the USPS server had changed its service finder. I just fixed it and was glad to do so as I hadn’t realized that domestic rates had gone up from $0.39 to $0.41 recently. When I made that post, a kind reader pointed out the forever stamps now available in different countries. The concept is simple. You never have to be confused by the changing postage rate as the value of the stamp is eternal.

A few posts back we debated the value of saving time and concluded that there are often moments when you wish to savor an experience for a longer period. In the savoring case, you would want to prolong the pleasure. But on the other hand, there are definite instances for when you’d like to curtail the pain of an experience — like trying to figure out whether you have enough postage affixed to your envelope.

I have a friend that purposefully collects the most beautiful stamps to periodically affix to his personal communications. The experience of receiving these letters is profound. In that sense, he has chosen favoring emotion over the efficiency of saving time.

So in conclusion, as I send this letter off to the health insurance agency to whom I have no particular feelings for on this date and don’t mind the efficiency of a forever stamp, I feel my life is simplified. But tomorrow as I ship a few letters off to some old friends, I think I might browse through my stamp drawer to see if I can find something more emotion-ally meaningful.

As someone who makes images for a living, I find that the process of making images gets harder with age. One would think it should be easier with time. Something about losing the ability to concentrate; or maybe perhaps a resistance to shut everything else around me. I was good at that when I was younger. Shutting out everything and everyone else around me. It made everything much simpler really.

Writing a simple computer program can easily lead you to complex imagery. It turns out however, that the real world around us is perfectly complex. So I wonder nowadays … why bother to try to compete with Mother Nature? Of course I know the answer — because we can [attempt to do so].

Around fifteen years ago I observed the cover of a Japanese magazine with a polygonal figure as the main subject. My immediate reaction was that it was done by computer. It turned out it was simply a wooden figure carved with few smooth surfaces. This sort of “hurt” my brain. At the time I was fixated with deriving a distinct category of computer generated imagery, only to discover that there could be no such thing.

Today computer imagery has very few such polygonal artifacts, thus making it close to impossible to distinguish real from the non-real. Does it matter anymore? Probably not. And thus I find the same satisfaction when snapping a photograph that I do in finding the right computer algorithm to express myself. The latter takes much longer to develop as an actual hands-on process of mathematics and computer codes; the former indeed takes less time as the press of a shutter button, but years in order to get to the moment when nature presents itself. Ready to be captured.